This post is for the benefit of anyone wondering about, researching, or going into business on the proposition that selling one’s own personal data is a good idea. Here are some of my learnings from having studied this proposition myself for the last twenty years or more.

1. The business does exist. See eleven companies in Markets for personal data listed among many other VRM-ish businesses on the ProjectVRM wiki.
2. The business category harvesting the most personal data is adtech (aka ad tech and “programmatic”) advertising, which is the surveillance-based side of the advertising business. It is at the heart of what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism, and is now most of what advertising has become online. It’s roughly a trillion-dollar business. It is also nothing like advertising of the Mad Men kind. (Credit where due: old-fashioned advertising, aimed at whole populations, gave us nearly all the brand names known to the world). As I put it in Separating Advertising’s Wheat and Chaff, Madison Avenue fell asleep, direct response marketing ate its brain, and it woke up as an alien replica of itself.
3. Adtech pays nothing to people for their data or data about them. Not personally. Google may pay carriers for traffic data harvested from phones, and corporate customers of auctioned personal data may pay publishers for moments in which ads can be placed in front of tracked individuals’ ears or eyeballs. Still, none of that money has ever gone to individuals for any reason, including compensation for the insults and inconveniences the system requires. So there is little if any existing infrastructure on which paying people for personal data can be scaffolded up. Nor are there any policy motivations. In fact,
4. Regulations have done nothing to slow down the juggernaut of growth in the adtech industry. For Google, Facebook, and other adtech giants, paying huge fines for violations (of the GDPR, the CCPA, the DMA, or whatever) is just the cost of doing business. The GDPR compliance services business is also in the multi-$billion range, and growing fast. In fact,
5. Regulations have made the experience of using the Web worse for everyone. Thank the GDPR for all the consent notices subtracting value from every website you visit while adding cognitive overhead and other costs to site visitors and operators. In nearly every case, these notices are ways for site operators to obey the letter of the GDPR while violating its spirit. And, although all these agreements are contracts, you have no record of what you’ve agreed to. So they are worse than worthless.
6. Tracking people without their clear and conscious invitation or a court order is wrong on its face. Period. Full stop. That tracking is The Way Things Are Done online does not make it right, any more than driving drunk or smoking in crowded elevators was just fine in the 1950s. When the Digital Age matures, decades from now, we will look back on our current time as one thick with extreme moral compromises that were finally corrected after the downsides became clear and more ethically sound technologies and economies came along. One of those corrections will be increasing personal agency rather than just corporate capacities. In fact,
7. Increasing personal independence and agency will be good for markets, because free customers are more valuable than captive ones. Having ways to gather, keep, and make use of personal data is an essential first step toward that goal. We have made very little progress in that direction so far. (Yes, there are lots of good projects listed here, but there we still a long way to go.)
8. Businesses being “user-centric” will do nothing to increase customers’ value to themselves and the marketplace. First, as long as we remain mere “users” of others’ systems, we will be in a subordinate and dependent role. While there are lots of things we can do in that role, we will be able to do far more if we are free and independent agents. Because of that,
9. We need technologies that create and increase personal independence and agency. Personal data stores (aka warehouses, vaults, clouds, life management platforms, lockers, and pods) are one step toward doing that. Many have been around for a long time: ProjectVRM currently lists thirty-three under the Personal Data Stores heading. Some have been there a long time. The problem with all of them is that they are still too focused on what people do as social beings in the Web 2.0 world, rather than on what they can do for themselves, both to become more well-adjusted human beings and more valuable customers in the marketplace. For that,
10. It will help to have independent personal AIs. These are AI systems that work for us, exclusively. None exist yet. When they do, they  will help us manage the personal data that fully matters:
    • Contacts—records and relationships
    • Calendars—where we’ve been, what we’ve done, with whom, where, and when
    • Health records and relationships with providers, going back all the way
    • Financial records and relationships, including past and present obligations
    • Property we have and where it is, including all the small stuff
    • Shopping—what we’ve bought, plan to buy, or might be thinking about,
    • Subscriptions—what we’re paying for, when they end or renew, what kind of deal we’re locked into, and what better ones might be out there.
    • Travel—Where we’ve been, what we’ve done, with whom, and when

Personal AIs are today where personal computers were fifty years ago. Nearly all the AI news today is about modern mainframe businesses: giants with massive data centers churning away on ingested data of all kinds. But some of these models are open sourced and can be made available to any of us for our own purposes, such as dealing with the abundance of data in our own lives that is mostly out of control. Some of it has never been digitized. With AI help it could be.

I’m in a time crunch right now. So, if you’re with me this far, read We can do better than selling our data, which I wrote in 2018 and remains as valid as ever. Or dig The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012), which Tim Berners Lee says inspired Solid. I’m thinking about following it up. If you’re interested in seeing that happen, let me know.

I wrote this today for a list that’s mostly populated by folks in overlapping music, broadcasting, legal, tech, and other businesses who share a common interest in what’s happening to the arts and artists they care about in a world now turning almost completely digital.—Doc

Here is a question I hope can get us out of our heads, our histories in the businesses (music, broadcasting, entertainment, publishing, law, pick-your-art), and up past the 30,000-foot level, out into space, so its possible, at least conceptually, to see the digital world that now coexists with the physical one, but with completely new blessings and curses that may have little to do with the physical world models that operate with and under it.

With that in mind, let’s try putting our minds outside the supply side of the marketplace, with all its incumbent mechanisms and rules, and where all of us have operated for the duration. We’re in space now, looking down on the digital and physical worlds, free to see what might be possible in these co-worlds.

Now try visiting this question: As a consumer or customer (not all the same) of artistic goods, what would you be willing to pay for them if payment was easy and on your terms and not just those of incumbent industries and their regulatory frameworks?

For example, Would you pay the recording artists, performers, producers, and composers the tiny amounts most of them get from a play on Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, Apple Music, Pandora, SiriusXM, a radio station or indirectly through the movies or TV shows that feature those goods?

Try not to be mindful of standing copyright regimes, deals made between all the parties in distribution chains, and subscription systems as they stand. In fact, try to put subscription out of your minds and think instead of what you would want to pay, value-for-value, in a completely open marketplace where you can pay what you like for whatever you like, on an á la carte basis. Don’t think how. Think how much. Imagine no coercion on the providers’ side. You’re the customer. You value what you use and enjoy, and are willing to pay for it on a value-for-value basis.

To help with this, imagine you have your own personal AI: one that logs all the music you hear, all the programs you watch, all the podcasts you listen to, all the radio you play in your car, and can tell you exactly how much time you spent with each. Perhaps it can tell you what composers, writers, producers, labels, and performers were involved, and help you know which you valued more and which you valued less. (Again, this is your AI, not Microsoft’s, Google’s, Facebook’s, or Apple’s. It works only for you, in your own private life.)

Then look at whatever you’re spending now, for all the subscription services you employ, for all the one-offs (concerts, movies in theaters, bands night clubs) you also pay for. Would it be more? Less? How much?

The idea here is to zero-base the ways we understand and build new and more open markets in the digital world, which is decades old at most and will be with us for many decades, centuries, or millennia to come. It should help to look at possibilities in this new non-place without the burden of leveraging models built in a world that is physical alone.

I submit that in this new world, free customers will be more valuable—to themselves and to the marketplace—than captive ones. And that sellers working toward customer capture through coercive subscription systems and favorable regulations will find less advantage than by following (respecting Adam Smith) the hand-signals of independent customers.

We don’t know yet if that will be the case. But we can at least imagine it, and see where that goes.